Halsted remains out of focus, but the significance of Johns Hopkins in modernizing the education of doctors is clear.
Ostensibly a biography of William Stewart Halsted (1852–1922), but the main story is the transformation of medical education in America.
Imber (Clinical Surgery/Weill-Cornell School of Medicine) tries valiantly to revivify the elusive Halsted. He was aristocratic and urbane, meticulous in his dress—he sent his shirts to Paris for laundering—and could be cold and imperious. He also had a strange, possibly sexless, marriage, but just what made him tick remains a mystery. Medical education in 19th-century America was haphazard at best, and surgery was often brutal and risky. After attending Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City and interning at Bellevue, like other young men of means, Halsted completed his medical education in Europe. His career as a surgeon was off to a brilliant start in New York in the 1880s, but his experiments with cocaine as a local anesthetic led to his addiction to it and later to morphine. Fortunately, his friend William Welch offered him a new start at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and in 1886, Halsted left New York for Baltimore. Although his presence at the school was interrupted by months of absence every year due to his drug dependency, he made numerous innovations in surgical technique. However, it was his contributions to the training of surgeons and his development of scientific, safe and anatomically proper surgery that cemented his reputation. He set exceptionally high standards for his residents at Hopkins, and Imber profiles a few, including the distinguished Harvey Cushing. Many of Halsted's students eventually became professors and chiefs of surgery, and in turn their residents became heads of major surgical facilities across the United States. In the author's view, anyone in America who undergoes a successful surgery owes a debt of gratitude to Halsted.
Halsted remains out of focus, but the significance of Johns Hopkins in modernizing the education of doctors is clear.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60714-627-8
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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